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Long story short: you have an NFS export and a proper configured /etc/fstab on your client. Mounting manually via mount -a works fine but nothing happens after reboot. Try to add the following to your /etc/default/rcS:

I don’t know why this is still an issue on Debian/Linux machines but it is as annoying as it already was 2 years or more ago. Imagine you want to export /home via NFSv4 on a server so your clients can mount it remotely. Mostlikely, you will end up with lots of nobody:nogroup labeled entries, when you do a ls -la /home on your client. Check your logfiles and when you find something like:

rpc.idmapd[1905]: nss_getpwnam: name ‘USERNAME’ not found in domain ‘localdomain’

chance is high your idmap is not properly configured. This service is needed for NFSv4 as far as I know. Unfortunately, it is sometimes deactivated by default. Check /etc/defaults/nfs-common for this entry:

NEED_IDMAPD=yes

which also will tell NFS to start idmapd on startup. Next step is to adjust domain settings which depends on your setup.

Check DNS/DHCP server config, especially on correct domain name and it’s export if this is desired

Check if the client correctly receives and sets domain name (see lease-file and domainname-command for example)

Last but not least you need to check /etc/idmapd.conf to have this entry:

Domain = yourdomain

where yourdomain must be set properly. If you’re not sure about the DNS/DHCP config and/or receive a (none) by the domainname command, you want to go with localdomain as value here.

Do not forget to restart all reconfigured services and that should fix the issue.

Ubuntu 10.10 uses NFS 4 by default. If you did not update your NFS-Server, while upgrading your client, you’ll receive a Remote I/O error, due to incompatibilities between version 3 and version 4. Change the mount options in your /etc/fstab from defaults to vers=3,defaults to prevent this error.